NEW FICTION Crowded. I move across the car and stand in the doorway. It’s the rear of the front end of a double car. Just before the train leaves the station, a tall, thin man hurries on and thumps down into the empty aisle seat by the door across from me. He looks up at me. Then he looks again. He keeps doing it.

AN ONGOING BATTLE (cover to the French version of a Robert McAlmon memoir about the 1920’s Lost Generation) TWO THINGS recently caught my attention. FIRST was a quote from Susan Sontag giving…

NEW POETRY (publicdomainpicturesdotnet) Hello, my name is Hello.Yes, it rhymes with yellow, mellow, Jell-O. You know.I don't talk much, I just drink. Put me in a taxi, call me Buddy,take me anywhere. I don't care. Home is the bottom of a bottle,the last drop a farewell kiss before I blast into space,my veins full of rocket fuel.

A PYNCHON AUTHORSHIP CONTROVERSY That's the problem with a reclusive novelist like Thomas Pynchon. He might be non-existent. The writings m...

Don't kid yourself. We're not living in a golden age of literary criticism, as a few scribbling souls clinging desperately to their crumbling status would have you believe. Criticism exists in a symbiotic relationship with the art form it addresses. You can't have a golden age of criticism without a golden age of the art. There was once a golden age of rock/pop criticism, centered on magazines like…

A RANT EVERY TIME I begin to read a standard 7,000-word essay of literary criticism, I recall something Bret Easton Ellis once said at a bookstore appearance in Philadelphia: "Now I'm going to bore you for twenty minutes." (Then he did, by reading from his work.) Boredom, among the established literary set, is a given. For instance, however well, or mildly provocative, the standard…

NEW POETRY you won’t seea passage ofmy writingfeatured inthe SAT.you won’treada paragraphand think:the fuckdid ijust read?some writerstryto confuseyouwith theirpretenseandderanged syntax,but i aimto be clearand simple.so if youreadthe new yorkerand thinkthis writersounds like…

RECENTLY I read an article about famed film director Stanley Kubrick's "cool precision." Not long after, I read about the conflicts Kubrick had with actor Marlon Brando during the filming of the 1961 Western, "One-Eyed Jacks," which resulted in Stanley Kubrick leaving and Brando taking over as director of the project. Which started me thinking about approaches to writing, and to art in general.

by Lyn Michele Stevens On the east side of Manhattan, Esther had been sitting on the couch for the past two hours stroking Sparkles when the envelope with the handicapped parking pass slid under the door. She knew it had been delivered by courier from Jack. She looked down at the snow-white Persian cat in her lap. Underneath the long silky fur, she was skin and bones.

NEW FICTION The evening before, Jack had called eager to take her to see Shakespeare in the Park. Though Esther had always lived in a studio on York Avenue, she’d never been to Shakespeare in the Park (or the Empire State Building, or the Statue of Liberty). She was flattered Jack wanted to take her. It was only their second date.

THIS YEAR’S NOMINATIONS THE HARDEST PART of selecting nominees for compilations like Best of the Net is choosing between many excellent works all of which we love or we wouldn’t have ac…

OUR NOMINATIONS FOR 2026 BEST OF THE NET AT THE MOMENT we're strictly an on-line project, at least until we get our art printer fixed and begin cranking out print publications again. Which means the best location for nominating writing we've published is Best of the Net. SO: we nominated some of the work we've run, by some of the…

BEST STORIES AND POEMS DEPT. At New Pop Lit we'll put our stories, poems and essays up against ANYBODY'S. Case in Point #1: Our nominations for the 2026 Best of the Net collection. Case in Point #2: Our excellent current "Top of the Pop" fiction feature, "Big Lagoon" by Thomas Thonson. A plunge into deep water, but also into humanity and life. Have you read it yet? WHO has the best writing? WE do!

OUR NOMINATIONS FOR 2026 BEST OF THE NET AT THE MOMENT we're strictly an on-line project, at least until we get our art printer fixed and begin cranking out print publications again. Which means the best location for nominating writing we've published is Best of the Net. SO: we nominated some of the work we've run, by some of the…

THIS YEAR’S NOMINATIONS THE HARDEST PART of selecting nominees for compilations like Best of the Net is choosing between many excellent works all of which we love or we wouldn’t have ac…

A RANT (Image c/o wikiwand. Early Brutalism?) THE PROBLEM with our intellectual class is how easily impressed they are with the facade of intellectualism, especially when presented in a university setting. THE CLASSIC example of such is the so-called Frankfurt School of German Marxist intellectuals who set up shop in the United States (at Columbia University in New York) when the Austrian paper hanger and his crew of violent misfits took power in Germany in 1933.

Assassination of X - Kindle edition by Wenclas, King. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading Assassination of X.

FLASH FICTION (image c/o wallpapersafari) Stephanie goes out back with her morning coffee to find her milkweed bush covered with September monarchs preparing for their long flight back to Mexico. Then she’s inside her earliest memory of her father, back from World War II, seeing each other for the first time. It was the season of monarchs then too, and they had a milkweed bush covered then like now in butterflies.

LATE SUMMER! Post-Labor Day. A time of earlier sunsets, cooling nights, and poignant melancholy accompanying the end of summer's carefree days. A time of change, wistfulness, memories. Our new feature short story, "Big Lagoon" by Thomas Thonson is a tale about summer experiences and memories, of present merging with past-- with persons from the past-- an artistic blend of setting and personality, of experience that jumps out at you.